Dear Bud,

The following is an open letter that I one day hope to send to MLB commissioner Bud Selig regarding the all star game.

Commissioner Selig,

I know that you are a baseball purist at heart and care deeply about the history and integrity of the game. You also care deeply about your legacy which is why I'm certain that you will do everything in your power to rid the game of the tarnish put on it by steriods and other performance enhancing drugs.

Which is why I'm dumbfounded how you could let the MLB all star game, aka the Mid Summer Classic, fall to such a low level. For a man with the ability to think outside the box and bring us such revolutionary concepts as realignment, interleague play, the wild card, and the World Baseball Classic I'm shocked that the injustices surrounding the all star game have so far gone unnoticed.

Surely, such a wise man as yourself would admit that having one representative per team is an antiquated idea. It may have been motivation for fans to watch when you were a kid growing up and the only game you could watch on tv was your local team. But nowadays when there are 10 national games on tv per week and everyone 'owns' at least 5 fantasy baseball teams the motivation for watching an all star game no longer revolves around team pride. In an information age the fans want to see the best players, the players that they know deserve to be there, and not some has been and never will be that they can see 162 other times a year. Trust me, no one in Kansas City is going to watch Trading Spaces instead of the All Star Game if Mark Redman is not on the roster. In fact, places like KC relish the all star game because it's their one chance a year to see how baseball is supposed to be played. So when the game that matters is on the line and you have Redman pitching to Freddy Sanchez when you could have had Francisco Liriano pitching to Nomar Garciaparra just know that you'll have no one to blame but yourself.

Player representation aside it's a real shame that you've let the powers that be at Fox influence you so much that an exhibition game now decides home field advantage in the World Series. Such sophomoric marketing tricks have now rendered your entire regular season completely useless. There's absolutely no motivation now to try and get the best record in baseball. As evidenced by the fact that from 2001 to 2005 every team that won the World Series was a wild card winner. It's clear that the only thing that matters is getting into the postseason. Once there anything can happen.

Now I can't just sit here and complain about how bad of a job you're doing when it comes to the all star game and not do anything about it. It's not in my nature. As such, here a few suggestions I have for enhancing the game and selection process.

First off, how about implementing automatic bids. Any hitter who is leading the league in a major offensive category, i.e. batting average, homeruns, rbis, and runs or any pitcher who is leading in a major pitching category, i.e. earned run average, wins, saves, and strikeouts would get an automatic bid to the team. This way you wouldn't have a scenario like you do this year in which NL batting average leader Nomar Garciaparra, AL homerun leader Jason Giambi, and AL Cy Young candidates Liriano and Curt Schilling aren't included on the team.

Secondly, I would get rid of the rule that the only players selected to the all star team are eligible to be in the home run derby. That way you can have good players who get snubbed for the team but who should really be there like Giambi, Adam Dunn, and Travis Hafner competing in the derby.

You could also have dh rules in effect regardless of whether the host city is an american league or national league team, create other skills competitions other than the homerun derby to get away from it's associations with steriods, and of course as previously stated get rid of the one representative per team rule.

If you do that then I believe that your legacy will be cemented as baseball's greatest commissioner. But if you continue to push the all star game aside then it will stain your legacy worse than steriods, Pete Rose, and the Montreal Expos combined. I hope that you will learn from your own mistakes the way that you have thus far learned from the mistakes of your predecessors.

Sincerely,

Craig Shames
Concerned Baseball Fan